Question

For my personal purposes I’d like to parse comments in Android Manifest file. In these comments there can be tags with attributes and values that I want to extract. It is similar to tag in html files that is usually commented because some browsers does not support this tag. So I want to implement similar things in android manifest.

I know that in Android manifest file is parsed using SAXParser. Moreover, I think I should use LexicalHandler for this purposes but I’ve never faced before with this functionality and I want to know how to do this. Code snippets and any help will be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

I’m entirely sure that you cannot parse the raw XML Manifest, because like everything that is in the res folder (except res/raw), the manifest is compiled and stored in a binary format, so the comments are removed.

Maybe you can play with xmlns and capture the manifest parsing… But I doubt it, the Manifest is interpreted by the package manager, and I don’t think that you can have access to it.

The solution (from your feedbacks):
The requested feature is impossible, because during the compilation all comments from AndroidManifest file are removed.

You can check this in the following way:

1. Create a simple app project (Hello World) and add comments in your AndroidManifest file.
2. Compile project and export an .apk file (signed or unsigned).
3. Using tools like apktool or similar extract your apk file.
4. Check the result in AndroidManifest.xml – there are no comments.

You should try to find other way.